Village SOS

WREG through to the next round of Village SOS and Village Energy Audit.

We've had notice by email today that WREG has made it through to the next round of the Village SOS. On offer is a Grant up to £30,000, but the project must fit the competion criteria.

To get past the next round, we need to come up with a viable, workable business plan and complete all the other requested paperwork that meets Villa SOS rules. We want as many to be involved in this process as possible. So hopefully a meeting can be arranged.No doubt you will all by now have had your Warcop Renewable Energy Surveys. I'll be post this Audit Form as an online survey over the weekend.

Please fill these in because if we work together as a community we can make big savings almost immediately!

If you need any help please get in touch or come to the village hall tomorrow morning or how about popping up to the Cyberbarn next week for a coffee and bringing the form with you or we can show you how to complete it online.

The Exchange tomorrow morning will be accepting the forms back as well as Warcop school until 18th November 2011.Update: May 10th 2011

Short-term views are not viable within communities such as Warcop and should be avoided at all costs, especially where they asset strip this village. In the past, many people left land, buildings, and funds for the benefit of the community future. We should do the same for the next generations.

Somehow, we need to negotiate the minefields of bureaucracy, greed, H&S and all the other problems our society has created, to leave a legacy to our children so that another book about Warcop can be written - 100-150 years on from the last, showing what can be done when the community good is at the heart of what is done by the many people who 'know their place'.

But we were an independent lot, everyone regarded himself as being as good as, perhaps better than, the next one, not in an arrogant way but with a fierce belief that what he did was as important in the village as what anyone else did.

Big picture, long-term thinking is required, and there are companies and organisations all around us who can help. We are a Big Society vanguard area, with huge potential for making things happen. And it is Our Society to shape for the coming generations, just as those before us left the Reading Room, Village Hall, etc.

Warcop Renewable Energy Group has been awarded grant funding by the Energy Savings Trust to look at the options available to the village for carbon savings schemes, a hydro scheme, biomass, carbon reduction on a public building, and various other potential solutions to generate electricity, save money on fuels, and use village assets (including land, buildings, water and trees). The work is ongoing as of today - a very quick, and reasonably painless, turnaround on grant funding!

This is great news, and luckily it was a lovely day today for wandering around with CORE looking at water courses, woods, village buildings, and talking about possible schemes.

We also discussed holding a short seminar for landowners and farmers to discover what options are available for us to work together to get the best feed-in tariffs, deals on equipment and so on. More news on this shortly, and WREG will be at The Exchange on Saturday in Sandford if anyone would like to come and have a chat.

Update: 05.03.11

WREG have submitted an application to the Energy Savings Trust for grant funding to begin the process of investigating how we can achieve some of the ideas for Warcop. We hope to hear very shortly whether we have been awarded the grant funding.

The plans are to restore the electricity generating capabilities of the village, reduce the carbon footprint of the whole village, and save money for residents and businesses. Additional to this are plans to "join a few dots" - more news on that soon!

Reducing the carbon footprint:

Ashton Hayes in Cheshire (1000 residents) has just announced that it is the first village to go carbon neutral. There are fantastic carbon reduction and carbon neutral resources on the website which we should all begin looking at.

The video can be watched below

Update: 01.03.2011 We have just received an email regarding group purchase of oil and electricity by a village of 215 homes in Co. Durham. (i.e. not dissimilar to Warcop + Sandford).

The potential saving to the villagers by all buying oil and electricity together in that village would be £17,000 per annum in oil and £30,000 p.a. in electricity. This sort of cost saving would make a huge difference to all of us in the village and should be discussed by all of us at the next WREG meeting.

Update: 27.02.2011 After a really useful meeting with Simon from the Cumbria Community Renewable Fund, we're just putting in an application for 3 days free consultation from the Energy Saving Trust via Community Renewable Energy - CORE. This should enable us to find out the feasibility of using the Mill site and any other sources of renewable energy within Warcop.

It may seem quite ambitious to re-open the race and water mill, support our farmers to put solar panels on the field margins, and have heat sinks in our fields to heat houses in the village.

Warcop should be eco-friendly and self-sustainable, considering how much water, sun and wind we get across the Parish. And the new build (17 more houses are due to be built) should be eco-friendly etc.

This could all prove quite profitable if we do it as a village, together, under the Feed-In Tariffs. But it requires some discussion.....